In this new segment of the Point we will be walking through the day of a collegiate student-athlete, this week’s spotlight is on freshman wide receiver of the Falcons football squad PJ Norton. Norton is a freshman majoring in Accounting, he is a graduate of Essex Technical High School.

“ I wake up at about 8 am on a Tuesday, and take a quick shower, usually I only get a couple of hours of sleep from the night before, my first class starts at 9:30 and I try to get a bite before classes my second class is at 11:00 and my third class is at 12:30, I come out of my classes at around 1:45, it is a Tuesday so that means having a math quiz, after my academic day is done I go to the dining hall at around 2 pm, it gets a little rough on nutrition because by that time I am already starving but by that time the options at the dinning hall the options are a really limited.

I leave the dinning hall and immediately go to treatment in order to recover my body from last night’s practice, treatment is something that needs to be scheduled in advance because we do not count with many athletic trainers, at the oment we only have 3 on site so you have to schedule it sometimes over the weekend because the slots get filled up pretty quickly, after that i have positional meetings and they typically consist of watching film from saturday’s game and we also watch a little bit of scout on our next opponent, we take notes on the players we are going to have the most encounters on the opposing team, positional meetings are done by 4:30 after that i walk back to my room and leave some of my stuff in there and immediately head to dinner at around 5:00 grab some quick dinner because at 5:30 we have a team meeting or a unit meeting at 5:30 which doesnt leave us a lot of time to eat a good dinner, after our meetings we head back to our dorms or house to get ready for practice which on a Tuesday is 7-9 PM.

The majority of the time you have to get to the field house up to an hour before practice to get some extra stretches or get taping done depending on your health status. Practice starts with a specialists period then our dynamic stretch followed by multiple individual periods, after that we get into a skelly format which is a passing period, after that we go back to individual drills and then we finish with team periods followed by conditioning and static stretch. After practice is done we cool down in the locker room and proceed to get ice or remove the tape from our bodies. I get home at around 10 p.m. I cook something because after practice you are starving but it is usually not a nutritive option, start up some homework or project, take a shower, go to bed at 2-3 AM and get ready for the 6 am lift the very next morning and my day repeats over for the whole week.

In conclusion, I believe that being a football player or collegiate athlete is not for everybody, I find out more and more that every day is a love-and-hate relationship, you have to love the sport because the time and dedication take a lot of drive and energy from your day, it is something I learned from making the jump from high school to college.”